Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Improved Crusader?

After my experiment with Ret, I respec to Prot for our SSC attempts last night. This time I left Improved Crusader out of my build.

I recorded both attempts in WWS, so now I can do some comparison. I'm going to use Hydross because it was a fight where I was able to keep Improved Crusader up the entire time and both attempts were one shots. The sample size may be too small, but let's see what the data reveals.

Remember that Improved Crusader gives 3% crit to the entire Raid.

First I'm going to look at one of our Hunters, Araxe. I know from my dealings with him that he is a skilled player and knows his hunter well.

In the attempt where I had Improved Crusader, his crit was 23%. In the attempt where I didn’t have it, his crit was 30%. He actually crit more when I didn’t have Improved Crusader.

Well, maybe he made changes to his own spec, or he got a new piece of gear. There are a lot of variables, so let’s keep digging. Looking at Lococrazy, another hunter, his Crit with Improved Crusader was 33%, but only 18% without.

One Hunter crit more with Improved Crusader, and one Hunter crit less. I love good conclusive evidence /sarcasm.

The Mages don’t help much more. 2 of our 3 Mages crit less the attempt where I had it, and the variance in both the case of the Hunters and the Mages is larger than 3%.

Then we get to melee. The two melee DPS (1 Warrior and 1 Rogue) who were in both attempts both saw more Crit on the attempt where I had Improved Crusader and the variance was almost exactly 3%, the very amount added by Improved Crusader. This would leave me to think that Improved Crusader is only affecting the melee, but our Feral Druid crit more when I didn’t have it by about 6%.

What I didn’t do that I should have was to note what group each person was in so I could see what other buffs, if any may have affected their crit like a Feral Druid who gives his group crit as well.

Raid DPS was higher when I didn’t have it by out 150DPS.

There are just too many variables for me to say conclusively if Improved Crusader was a good idea to drop or not.